Top Stories

THE DUBLIN WEB SUMMIT 2.0
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg speaks of HTML 5 and the web's future at the summit on 4 February, 2010.
EMC in Ireland
Chief executive, Joe Tucci, on EMC in Ireland and the future high-growth areas in IT.
Hide Header
MySpace insider data breach

Also in this section

 

Digital Life

MySpace insider data breach

20.04.2009
While the usual cause of a data breach at a social-networking site is down to an outsider hacking into the database, last week’s breach at MySpace was attributed to an employee who gathered the names, social security numbers and other personal information on a number of his co-workers.

The employee in question was detected and fired, but the discovery of the data breach led to a shutdown of MySpace’s Beverly Hills headquarters all day Thursday, as employees were told to work from home.

Amendment: A source close to Facebook states that the Bevery Hills powercut was unrelated to the internal data breach.

According to TechCrunch an email was sent out to all employees following discovery of the data breach, stating that the company was “analyzing their systems to reduce the possibility of any future breaches”.

There were no reports of a data breach of MySpace user information.

The last big data breach at MySpace was in June of last year, when a flawed security setting allowed Yahoo! users to simply type in the web address of private profiles and gain access to private pictures.

The private photos of celebrities including Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan were exposed in this security flaw, which questioned how secure data portability between sites such as Yahoo! and MySpace really is.

By Marie Boran

Site design by Whitespace Publishing. Web development and hosting by Tibus